shanson.co

This is the repo for my personal blog. It was moved from Rails to Middleman in Dec 2016.

Dependencies

Ensure you have Node.js and yarn installed, matching the versions in .ruby-version and .node-version. Install yarn dependencies with yarn install.

To build

To run the development server:

$ make start

The server will watch for changes and trigger live reload in the browser.

See Makefile for other tasks.

Deployment

The site is hosted on Netlify. Builds are automatically triggered and deployed when changes are pushed to master.

Post front-matter options

• title: the title
• date: not required since the date is in the post filename. Can be provided with a time to specify order if multiple posts are on the same day
• tags: tags for the post
• excerpt: text that is displayed when posts are listed and also in the post meta description. If not provided, READMORE can be inserted in a post to provide the excerpt cutoff point.
• published: if set to false, the post is only built in development mode (this is a Middleman Blog feature)
• draft: prevents post from showing on the post listing page and XML feed but is still accessible by direct link. It is best to give the post an old date so it doesn't affect the post count on the pages it is filtered from. This is a custom feature
• target: use this when posting an external link. Instead of using the 'excerpt' tag, post the content in the body so that the page isn't blank when linked to directly. External links display differently in the posts listing : host is shown, read timer not shown, and links directly to the external page. A helper automatically adds a link to the target to the end of the post body, which is used in the RSS feed and if the post is linked to directly. The RSS feed links to the target instead of the post page.